From Glory into Glory

Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter: Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow! (Hymn 192, The Hymnal 1982)

It would be nice if for once the world cooperated with our 50 days of Easter rejoicing. Away with sin and sorrow! Couldn’t we accomplish that for just 50 days?

Not these 50 days, clearly, nor any Easter that has ever been. We may wish to brush sin and sorrow away, but they will not be brushed. So is our joyful Eastertide just wishful thinking?

When we proclaim, as we do in the preface of the Eucharistic prayer during Eastertide, that “by his death he has destroyed death,” are we just wishful thinking?

What does it mean for us to proclaim that death has been destroyed in a world where death is very, very real, and clearly “alive and well”?

Does Easter have any real meaning in the face of a tragedy like Virginia Tech?

There is a sense in which Jesus himself acknowledges the problem. In our first reading this morning, the risen Jesus appears to Saul, who is “breathing threats and murder” against Jesus’ disciples. Jesus identifies himself as the one whom Saul is persecuting. In another telling of the story later in Acts (26:12-18), Paul says Jesus declared to him, “It hurts for you to kick against the goads.”

This is a protest from Jesus risen from the dead, fresh from what we call the destruction of death, but clearly still subject even himself to the effects of sin and sorrow, threats and murder.

Clearly the resurrection did not “destroy death,” or even sin, by simply making it go away, or even by ending its power over human life. So how then can we say this with any honesty? How is death destroyed?

First of all just in the ongoing presence of Jesus. Certainly we do have faith that Jesus himself has destroyed at least his own death. “Death no longer has dominion over him,” as Paul says elsewhere (Romans 6:9). God is alive, and so one of the chaplains at Virginia Tech said this week that the one thing he could say with certainty to members of that community despite what had happened is that, “God is even here.” That alone is good news worth telling.

But it is not enough yet, because there is the further question of, “What about us?”

There are two answers to this question, both of them right and important. They are found in our other two readings this morning.

The first answer is about a vision, a vision of eternity, of what we sometimes call heaven, of all creation gathered around God in praise, “myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands.”

The destruction of death is a vision, a vision of eternity, the fullness of time, when, as the writer of the Revelation says later, “death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (21:4).

And so we Christians rightly say that death will ultimately be defeated, and this gives us enough faith to go on, and to give God praise and thanks in this life even in the face of death, for, as we say in our burial service, “even at the grave we make our song, ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 499).

But this too is not enough. It is a lot, but it is not enough. For what about this life? For if death is destroyed only in heaven, then is this life only a vale of tears, something to be endured until the great reward in the next life? Some have seemed to say so. But then how can the psalmist say, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning?” Can joy ever truly come in our earthly mornings, we who live in the valley of the shadow of death?

The answer is in the Gospel reading this morning, although it is not as obvious as the vision of heaven in the Book of Revelation.

Most of us are at least somewhat familiar with this encounter between Jesus and Simon Peter. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Three times asked, three times answered. What is going on here?

An obvious answer is that Jesus is reminding Peter of his earlier threefold denial. Clearly this has something to do with it, although I am a bit uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus is somehow getting back at Peter, as if there were at least a subtle vindictiveness in his questioning. Jesus has just come back and forgiven them all, Peter included. Does it make sense that he is now making Peter do some further penance?

What is going on here is related to Peter’s earlier denial but is much more complex than a simple tit for tat, and much more universal. What is going on ultimately is meant for all of us who would be disciples of Jesus, signified in the final statement by Jesus, “Follow me,” a commandment surely not meant for Peter alone.

The complexity is found especially in Greek and isn’t easily translated into English. Let me give it a try, using words other than just “love.”

Jesus asks, “Simon Peter, do you love me more than life itself (agapé)?”

Peter replies, “Lord, you are like a brother to me (phileo)”. Not exactly an answer to the question.

Jesus asks again, “Simon, son of John, will you sacrifice your life for me (agapé)?”

Peter replies, “I swear we are as tight as two people can get (phileo).” Again, not exactly an answer to the question.

Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, are we brothers (phileo)?”

Peter, hurt because Jesus seems to be questioning even what he was willing to say, replies, “Of all people, you know that you are my brother (phileo).”

What Peter does not get in this exchange is that Jesus is not talking about their personal relationship. He is talking about Peter’s life, his ministry. “Feed my sheep.” Jesus is calling Peter to move beyond their personal relationship, even the personal relationship he has with the other disciples. If you love me you will feed my sheep. Even if you would not lay down your life for me last week, you will lay it down for my followers in the future. You will die for them just like I did.

And, as I said, this is not just about Peter. It is about all of us who would follow Jesus. We are called not just to feel good about one another, to have a sense of family, belonging. We are called to lay down our lives for each other and for the world.

And this is the other way in which we can honestly say that death has been destroyed among us. We are called to live, to act, as if death had no power over us, not just in some future heaven, but right now. This, finally, gets us beyond wishful thinking to hopeful acting.

It is not an easy thing, to which this conversation between Jesus and Peter attests. And we resist it, as is also clear here. There is a sense in which Jesus knows Peter will resist this right to the end. “Someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you to a place where you do not wish to go,” Jesus warns him.

Yet that “place” is the whole point of Christianity, the whole point of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the whole point of what we mean when we say that “by his death he has destroyed death.” The point is that if I am truly to follow Jesus, saving my own skin is not a top priority for me.

And when it is not I have finally moved from wishful thinking about death to hopeful acting against it.

That is a very difficult place to be and not all of us are there, and probably none of us is there all the time. But do not be fooled, it is the journey we are on.

It is good for us to be clear about that—about each of these three ways in which we do believe that death has been destroyed.

Jesus is alive. Death could not hold him in its power.

We hold the vision of life beyond death, which ultimately will not be able to hold us in its grip either.

And we are committed to live as if death did not matter, not living for the sake of saving our own skin, but laying down our lives for one another.

Because of these things, even after this week, we can still sing, “this joyful Eastertide,” “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia,” and “by his death he has destroyed death.”

Isaiah 65:17-25

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth…be glad and rejoice for ever in what I am creating.

In the life of ancient Israel there were people who kept the dream alive. They were the prophets. We heard from one of them this morning, Isaiah. People like Isaiah were prophets not because they could predict the future but because they were called by God to announce it. They were folks called by God to stand in the human present and speak about the divine future.

One of the most important proclamations of the Bible from beginning to end is that our human present is not all that there is. There is a future that belongs to God. It belongs to God just like the beginning belonged to God—In the beginning God…are the first words of the Bible. In the end God… are its last words.

The problem with being human is that we live in between the beginning that is God’s and the end that is God’s. We live “in the meantime,” and the time can, truth to tell, be pretty mean.

I do have to say, “Life is good.” Each one of us has much for which to be thankful, and I do not want to downplay that in the least. But there is other truth that must be spoken.

That truth is about the meantime that is the time that is mean.

The time is “mean” in our church, fighting about who is loving whom, with the constant drumbeat of wars and rumors of wars—enough to drive many of us to consider Buddhism as a reasonable alternative.

The time is “mean” in our city, for which we need no other evidence than the two young people murdered in 2006 and 2007 related to this congregation. Rodnell Hartzog and Joshua Lee were victims of the mean time.

The time is mean in our country when disagreement with those in power leads to the now predictable questioning of one’s patriotism, when countless thousands have died, including 3,271 of our own brave young people, as the result of an orchestrated lie. And 24,314 soldiers wounded, the forgotten ones, not only by us but by the very government they were defending.[1]

The time is mean when only 40% of the kids in our city schools graduate and although most of us are aware of this horrific number, no one is rioting on the streets because they are outraged by it.

The time is mean in our personal lives when despair and hopelessness, cynicism and greed, disease and death seem to rule our lives, including my own. The death of my cousin Jeff at 43 a couple weeks ago was a death in the mean time. So was the death of our friends Rudy McClenney and Dick Comegys and Jean Smith and Margaret Marcus in the last year. And I know of your personal tragedies and trials, too many to number.

Into the mean time of ancient Israel’s life, prophets like Isaiah were called to speak a different word, a word beyond the mean present to a different future. And whether or not that different future could be accepted as really possible, the primary purpose of its announcement was to say, “Do not absolutize the present! Do not freeze in this moment! Do not think this is all there is!”

The resurrection of Jesus announces this same message to us. It was and is a breaking into our mean time by the future that belongs to God where the rules are different and the purposes of God—life and love, faith and hope—are no longer thwarted, where weeping and distress no longer rule the day, and where children, as Isaiah says, are not born for calamity.

But is this all just a dream? Is it indeed so much of a dream that its very impossibility actually makes it a nightmare? Are the prophets—Jesus included—just dreamers whose dreams of new heavens and a new earth only mock the ones we are stuck with? Are we just stuck here in the mean time? Is there a way to get ourselves unstuck?

There is, but I can pretty much guarantee we will not like the answer. Few people ever have. I don’t most of the time.

The prophets of ancient Israel were not popular or honored people. Jesus got himself killed because he would not shut up. But followers of Jesus have always said that it is in his very death that we find this answer, and it is an answer on the same trajectory of the prophets before him.

The answer is, as Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann says, serious disarmament.[2] This answer is only implied in the dream from Isaiah 65—where do we think the sound of weeping and cries of distress come from? It is only made explicit in terms of our animal friends, who will no longer in this dreamed of world have to kill one another for food—the dog and cats in our household have yet, however, to hear this good news. But it is explicit in other versions of this dream. The prophet Micah’s version is the best known:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.[3]

For the dream to be real we must be willing to dismantle our weapons. That includes, yes, our real weapons of killing or even, as we like to think, defense, but, probably more importantly, it includes those other things that keep us living in the mean time. Primarily today I am thinking about these dismantlings:

We must dismantle our weapons of cynicism that assumes the worst from everyone, especially those that are different from us.

We must dismantle our weapons of anxiety and fear that label others as threats until they are proven to be friends, and that seek to provide our own security no matter what the cost to the dignity, much less the livelihood, of others.

We must dismantle our aggression, the root of the violence that is epidemic among us, the aggression that believes that my success depends upon your defeat.

And, perhaps most odd sounding to us, and really terrifying if we are honest, we must dismantle our expectations for more, for luxurious and leisurely living. Such is not the vision of Isaiah’s dream, as it was never the vision of Jesus’ dream. Look at Isaiah’s dream closely—we are promised in the dream only life itself, a home, and food enough. That’s it, but for most of us and our appetites, that is not enough.

The weapons that most of us must beat into plowshares to have any chance at Isaiah’s or Jesus’ dream are just these things: cynicism, anxiety, aggression, and greed. These are the things that keep us from the dream, that keep us in “the meantime,” the times that are mean.

What we are being invited into on this Easter Day, by Jesus who shared our mean time and was himself destroyed by it, but now lives wholly within the dream of God, is to make choices that at least begin to take the “mean” out of the time of our lives. We do not have to wait until the next life to experience the dream of God—that is not the message of the resurrection.

We are created by God free women and men, with our own dignity in our own hands. We have the capacity to choose to live life as if the dream were real. As Brueggemann puts it,

We could be children of war and resentment and fear and anxiety and aggressiveness. We need not, however, live that way. There is another way that God intends among us…[4]

Can we name that way this morning?

It is the way of trust that the world has been made so that there is enough for everyone, and so we can beat our swords of competition into plowshares of generosity.

It is the way of peace that rejects life as just a game of “Survivor” writ large, and so we can beat our spears of aggressiveness into pruning hooks of cooperation.

It is the way of faith in a God who loves us in spite of everything, even our own inevitable death, and so that we can beat our swords of fear into plowshares of hope.

It is the way of grace in a world that values control, and so that we can beat the spears of our rules about who is in and who is out into pruning hooks of hospitality.

The good news of this day is that all the ways we think the world works in this mean time: aggression and greed and despair and cynicism and death have been ultimately defeated by the God of Jesus Christ, and we, ourselves, have been given a share of his spirit so that we too may be dreamers of impossible dreams, and, more importantly, doers of impossible things.

The story we carry from this place today is simple. It goes like this: God, who owns the beginning and who owns the end, has shared our in between, our meantime, and found it just as mean as we do. It ate him, literally, alive. But the dream did not die with him, nor must it die with us. And we must not only wait for this dream, we must, like the prophets before us, announce it and live in it, no matter what the cost. Not only our future, but our present, depends on our doing so.

So announce it church:

We’re not living in the meantime, the time that is mean—we’re already living in the future that belongs to God. Death is the last enemy—our brother Paul is right—but it has already been beaten.

Whether it looks like it or not, Christ is Risen and so, my sisters and brothers are you and I. There is no better news than that in this mean time.


[1] Deaths are as of April 6, 2007; wounded as of February 3, 2007, the last date for which the Pentagon has released figures.
[2] Inscribing the Text: Prayers and Sermons of Walter Brueggemann (Augsburg Fortress, 2004), p. 212. Many of the ideas that follow were inspired by the sermon from which this phrase comes, “A Resurrection Option,” using Micah 4:1-5 as the text.
[3] Micah 4:3.
[4] Ibid., p. 214.

[Sermon for Palm/Passion Sunday, April 1, 2007, with Luke's Passion as the Gospel].

“Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” Jesus answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Why did Jesus have to die?

To save us from our sins, right? That’s how the story goes, isn’t it? Humankind was so screwed up that we could not get right with God. God needs a sacrifice for sin, a bloody sacrifice, but nothing we could offer was enough. So God sent Jesus, his only Son, to be that sacrifice. And because Jesus was perfect, his sacrificed has covered our sins.

Right? Something along those lines is what most of us think this story is about? It’s how everybody talks about it, right?

Actually, not everybody; not the Gospel writer Luke, for instance. These things are not what Luke thinks is going on here at all. There is no sense in this story, if you have just listened to it carefully, that the reason for this death is to provide a bloody atonement for our sins.

Then what is this story about? I take my cue from the first Gospel reading we heard today, way back at the beginning of this Service, the nice part about the palms. You remember don’t you? That funny little line at the end of the story—it’s unique to Luke as he tells about Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem.

The religious leaders clearly think Jesus has gone over the top and they plead with him to get everyone to tone it down. Perhaps they were afraid of stirring up the political authorities. Perhaps they were just a bunch of Episcopalians made nervous by all the shoutin’.

Teacher, make your followers quiet down. If I made them be quiet, he says, then the stones in the road would shout.

And so I submit to you that the purpose of this story, of the cross, of Jesus’ death, is to turn stones into glory.

So I am going to tell you a different way of understanding this story, but first I am going to tell you of the practical consequences of telling it a different way.

There are many of them, but the one that is foremost in my mind and heart today comes out of my own experience in the past two weeks of my Cousin Jeff’s death. Jeff was the second oldest after me of my generation—forty three years old, a wife and three beautiful girls, 16, 13, and 9. He was a good guy: happy, generous, hard-working, faithful, almost always smiling. The line at eight o’clock at night at the visiting hours stretched out the door of the funeral home and down the sidewalk a hundred yards.

Jeff is dead. Died of brain cancer, against which he and his family fought bravely and hopefully right to the end. His wife Jamie, no one could possibly have done anymore, and she looked absolutely beaten.

And none of us knows what to say except what we think we are supposed to say. “He’s in a better place. There must be a reason. God’s will is hard to understand. God called him home.”

And because I am the designated family holy man, people especially feel the need to tell me these things, and I wish I had time to sit them down and explain why I do not think any of those things are true, but my own heart is so broken I can hardly speak. But Lord knows I want to stand in the middle of the room and shout, “Everybody stop. This sucks. This just sucks! And God thinks it does too. Would everybody just let God be broken-hearted along with the rest of us, please? The only thing God wants right now is for the very stones to cry out for the loss of this good man.”

You see, I think there is a direct connection between thinking that God insisted that Jesus had to die in order to be appeased by a bloody sacrifice, and our thinking that when someone we love dies, God must have a reason for inflicting this pain on him or her and us.

Now I will confess that you can find places in the New Testament that seem to back up that way of thinking and talking. But the story you just heard is not one of them, and, frankly, I’m sticking with it.

Luke’s Jesus does not die as an atoning sacrifice. He dies as an innocent victim. “Surely this man was innocent,” the centurion, who was supposed to be standing there like a stone, cries out. That is Luke’s message.

Now don’t get me wrong. Luke is absolutely convinced that Jesus is the Son of God. Go back and read the birth story we hear at Christmas every year. It’s Luke’s, and it’s pretty clear. This man is also divine. He himself is quite reticent about it. He’s humble, like we all should be, but that doesn’t mean Luke doesn’t want us to believe that this man is to be followed as the Son of God.

That is, in fact, his whole point. And we can absolutely trust this man, this Son of God, enough to follow him anywhere, because he himself has gone there—betrayed, humiliated, abandoned, and dead. All those awful places we have to go, he has gone. He is not just our God, he is our companion. Jesus walks with you and me, and not through some lovely garden, but into that funeral parlor and up to that coffin and back out on the street to take up living again even though that awful thing can happen to a good man.

Yet we still want to call it the will of God. “Only that,” as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “assumes a universe in which there are no other powers operating besides the power of God.”[1] And I, like her, do not believe that is true. I do not think Luke did either.

Whether we like it or not, the story of the Bible is the story of God sharing power with us. And the moral of the story is not that we should rely totally on God’s power, completely giving over our will to God, although I know plenty of Christians talk like that. I do not believe God wants us to rely completely on him or certainly not to completely abdicate our will. He gave it to us! The dream of God is partnership with the creation, with you and I, for the good of all. To obey God is to be God’s companion, not his lackey nor his punching bag.

We abuse the power God has given us. That is absolutely part of our story. And that too is what this story of Jesus’ death is about. It is a living parable of our ability to abuse our power in so great a fashion that we murder the ultimately innocent victim to assuage our own fear.

And now I just have to let Barbara Brown Taylor take over,

In this light, Jesus did not die to pay our bills. He died because he would not stop being who he was and who he was, was very upsetting. He turned everything upside down. He allied himself with the wrong people and insulted the right ones. He disobeyed the law. He challenged the authorities, who warned him to stop. The government officials warned him to stop. The religious leaders warned him to stop. And when he would not stop, they had to kill him, because he would not stop being who he was.[2]

So was the cross the defeat of God’s will rather than its realization? Yes, in a sense, if we mean by “God’s will” the punishment for our sins, or even the irrational, “Oh, let’s see, today it’s Jeff’s turn to suffer as part of my divine plan,” approach to God’s will.

But Jesus’ death was the will of God if we look at it this way, again with Barbara Brown Taylor:

One beloved human being chose to bear the consequences of being who he was and died with the same integrity that he lived. Insofar as it was the will of God that he live like that, then God’s will included the possibility [and, perhaps, even probability] of his death [as an innocent victim]—not as something God desired but as something God suffered.

Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers. It is not all that popular an idea, even among Christians. We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got. What the cross teaches us is that God’s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain. It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them.[3]

It is the power to turn a stone into glory. It is the power not to cause the death of my cousin, but to redeem it and him and you and me, a power whose vindication we will celebrate next week, so you had better come back because God and I are just getting warmed up.

Jesus died to show us the way through death, and on the journey, to show us how to teach stones to shout, "Glory!"

[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (Abingdon Press, 1998), p. 116. The paragraphs that follow are inspired by, and occasionally paraphrase, her as well.
[2] Ibid., p. 117.
[3] Ibid., p. 118.